resident Trump’s delayin reaching out to thefamilies of fourAmerican soldierskilled in Niger earlierthis month, and theensuing discussion among GoldStar families about his actions,recalls an earlier controversyinvolving Khizr Khan, the fatherof a fallen soldier, who spoke atthe 2016 Democratic NationalConvention.

On the final night of the convention, Khizr Khan took the
stage with his wife, Ghazala
Khan, and in an electrifying
moment, he pulled from his
pocket a small copy of the
Constitution.

“Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with
our future,” he said. “Let me ask
you: Have you even read the U.S.
Constitution? I will gladly lend
you my copy.” The crowd
exploded in applause.

Few people had ever heard of
Khizr Khan or knew of the sacrifice he and his wife had made for
their adopted country before the
couple took the stage. Their son
Army Capt. Humayun Khan was
killed by a car bomb in Iraq in
2004, and Hillary
Clinton’s campaign highlighted
Captain Khan’s life
and death in a
short film that
played before his
father spoke. But
the point was not
just to honor the
tragic loss of yet
another brave
American soldier;
it was to repudiate
the bigotry that
had been spewing
from Donald
Trump’s mouth
from the moment
he announced his
candidacy for
president.

Whether his target wasMuslims or Mexicans, Trumphad been insulting, taunting andthreatening groups he disagreedwith for more than a year, pledg-ing to ban all Muslims fromentering the United States andcalling Mexicans “rapists.”Khizr Khan had enough. APakistani-born and Harvard-trained lawyer, a Muslim, but,most important, a patriotic, nat-uralized American citizen, herevered the Constitution. Hecame to Philadelphia to teachDonald Trump a lesson. Trump’sresponse was to pick on Khan’swife, questioning why she wasjust “standing there” with“nothing to say,” adding that theClinton campaign had probablywritten Khizr Khan’s speech forhim. With his moving memoir,“An American Family,” KhizrKhan has disproved that calum-ny.

“An American Family: A
Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice” is
as much the universal story of
the immigrant experience in
America as it is the story of one
particular family’s struggles and
sacrifice.

Like most immigrants, Khizr Khan
came to America
seeking opportunity,
in his case the chance
to advance his education. When he arrived
in Houston in 1979,
Khan didn’t expect to
stay beyond the time
it would take him to
earn and save enough
to attend Harvard,
which had accepted
him for a master of
law degree but whose
tuition he couldn’t
yet afford.

He had alreadyfallen in love with theidea of America, withthe Declaration ofIndependence and theConstitution, which he’d stum-bled across almost by accident asa young law student in Pakistan.

“We hold these truths to beself-evident, that all men are cre-ated equal, that they areendowed by their Creator withcertain unalienable Rights,”Khan read from a sheaf of papershe’d picked up at a bookstore inLahore. “The thing is, thosetruths were not remotely self-evident. Not to a young man inPakistan and not to most peoplein the whole of human exis-tence,” he writes. “But to me, astudent in Pakistan, they wereradically charged — as revolu-tionary as they’d been two cen-turies earlierwhen they werefixed to paper.”Thus beganKhizr Khan’s longjourney tobecoming anAmerican, a jour-ney that took himfrom Pakistan,where his familywere poor farm-ers, to universityand law school,to his first job inDubai, his mar-riage to Ghazala,the birth of threesons and finallyto Harvard, to Washington, toCharlottesville, Va., and into thehomes of millions of Americanson national television. Along theway, he sometimes faced gruel-ing poverty but also the kindnessof strangers, including Americanoil company workers he encoun-tered in Dubai.

“Were all Americans likethis?” he asked himself after hisemployer and the man’s wifegave him an apartment to live in,furnished it and stocked therefrigerator. “Did a nation oflaws, of equal dignity for all,instill in its people a basic good-ness?” he wondered, a questionhe answered affirmatively whenhe moved to America and wasmet with generosity from neigh-bors and others of all races andcreeds.Khizr Khan’s book is also astory about family and faith, toldwith a poet’s sensibility. GhazalaKhan may have stood silentlynext to her husband inPhiladelphia — out of grief, per-haps — but Khan depicts her as alearned scholar with a master’sdegree in Persian, whom he fellin love with instantly but had towoo over the objections of hermother, who was unimpressedby the prospects of a strugglinglaw student. Their faith imbuesevery facet oftheir lives; but itis a tolerant,modern Islam,the kind prac-ticed by mostMuslims living inthe United Statesand around theworld.The book is awonderful refuta-tion of Trump’snativism and big-otry, but it is nopartisan polemic.Khizr Khaninvokes RonaldReagan’s visionof a shining cityon a hill several times in thebook, a man he calls “my presi-dent,” and for whom he says hewould have voted had he been acitizen at the time. “I am anAmerican patriot,” he writesnear the end of his book, “notbecause I was born here butbecause I was not. I embracedAmerican freedoms, raised mychildren to cherish and reverethem, lost a son who swore anoath to defend them, because Icome from a place where they donot exist.” The book can teachall of us what real Americanpatriotism looks like, evenPresident Trump.— The New York TimesPJimWilson/TheNewYorkTimesKhizr Khan displays hisConstitution while speaking abouthis son, who was killed serving inthe Army in Iraq, at the DemocraticNational Convention inPhiladelphia, July 28, 2016.